City of Hope, Stanford transplant pioneer Karl Blume dead at 75

Dr. Karl Blume, a pioneer in treating blood diseases who helped create renowned bone-marrow transplant programs at City of Hope and Stanford University School of Medicine, has died. He was 75.

Blume, a former Monrovia resident, died Jan. 9 at his Palo Alto home.

Most recently an emeritus professor of medicine at Stanford and a senior advisor for the Stanford Cancer Institute, Blume had recently received a lung transplant but had recuperated enough to return to his duties, Stanford colleagues said.

"He was one of the pioneers in the development of (stem cell) transplantation as a potential cure for people with leukemia," said Dr. Stephen J. Forman, City of Hope's chair of the Department of Hematology and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation. "When he entered the field, it was a therapy that was not well worked out and I think the work he did at City of Hope helped to make it a therapy that could cure where other therapies (could) not. There are a lot of people in our area who owe their lives to him."

One of them is Rodrigo Nunez, who had a bone marrow transplant at City of Hope in 1978. Nunez was then a 17-year-old San Joaquin Valley farm worker who had been diagnosed with a fatal blood disease called aplastic anemia. Nunez said he was so inspired by Blume and his staff that he went back to school to become a nurse. A decade after the procedure, Nunez began working at City of Hope, where he still works as a nurse today.

"Thanks to Dr. Blume, my life has changed completely - not only did he save my life but also (he and his staff inspired) everything I'm doing," Nunez, 52, said Tuesday.

Blume first came to Duarte's City of Hope in 1971-72 from the University of Freiburg in Germany as a research fellow. He returned three years later to lead City of Hope's new bone-marrow transplant program and performed its first successful transplant in 1976.

Blume became head of City of Hope's Department of Hematology and Bone Marrow Transplantation in 1979 and continued to expand the program until he left in 1987 to create a similar program at Stanford.

Since Blume's first transplant at City of Hope in May 1976, more than 11,000 life-saving stem-call transplants have been performed there.

Blume was the first editor of the major journal in the field, "Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation." Along with Forman and Nobel Laureate Dr. E. Donnall "Don" Thomas, he edited the first textbook on transplantation.

Blume was recruited by Stanford to start its own blood and marrow transplantation program. It went from doing two stem-cell transplants a year in 1988 to doing about 300 a year in 2012, said Dr. Ginna Laport, associate professor of medicine at Stanford's Bone Marrow Transplant Division.

"He was really a mentor, a very inspiring leader," Laport said Tuesday.